Jacob David Sudol(b. Des Moines, Iowa 1980) writes intimate compositions that explore enigmatic phenomena and the inner nature of how we perceive sound. He recently finished his M.Mus. at McGill University and currently resides in La Jolla, CA where he is working towards a Ph.D. in composition at the University of California at San Diego with Roger Reynolds, Chinary Ung, Philippe Manoury, and Rand Steiger.
Over the last five years some of Jacob's mentors in composition have included John Rea, Denys Bouliane, Philippe Leroux, Sean Ferguson, Dan Asia, and Craig Walsh. He has also participated in master classes with Danish composer Bent Sørensen and German composer Manfred Stahnke.
During 2005-2006, Jacob was the first-ever composer-in-residence for the McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble under the direction of Denys Bouliane, in collaboration with the McGill Digital Composition Studio. He has also written music for the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, the Contemporary Keyboard Society, percussionist Fernando Rocha, saxophonist Elizabeth Bunt, and clarinetist Krista Martynes. As an undergraduate at the University of Arizona, he composed the music for a collaborative dance project with choreographer Hillary Peterson, and he was the principal composer and pianist for El Proyecto de Santa Barbara, a chamber Latin jazz ensemble.
During the 2005 and 2007 Montréal/Nouvelles Musiques and 2006 MusiMars festivals Jacob was an electronic assistant for performances with Court-Circuit, Matt Haimovitz, Sara Laimon, Martin Matalon, Moritz Eggert, Manfred Stahnke, the Caput Ensemble, and the McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble. These concerts were broadcast by the CBC and the European Broadcasting Union in over fifty countries throughout the world. He is currently a studio research assistant for Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Roger Reynolds.
During his free time Jacob takes an active interest in religious phenomenology, cinema, acoustics, literature, poetry, and visual art. As a composer and performer, he always attempts to bring insights from these other fields into his work.
Disclaimer:
All music posted on this blog is posted out of love and the idea that for the truly great music of our time(s) to be known it must first and foremost be heard. If you like what you hear please support the artist by buying the recordings, scores, and/or encouraging the performances of the music in every way possible.
If you are the composer, performer, performing organization, artist or directly represent the composer, performer, performing organization, or artist of anything posted on this website and would like your material removed please contact me and I will happily oblige.
In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori baskets of olives and lemons, cobbles spattered with wine and the wreckage of flowers. Vendors cover the trestles with rose-pink fish; armfuls of dark grapes heaped on peach-down.
On this same square they burned Giordano Bruno. henchmen kindled the pyre close-pressed by the mob. Before the flames had died the taverns were full again, baskets of olives and lemons again on the vendors’ shoulders.
I thought of Campo dei Fiori in Warsaw by the sky-carousel one clear spring evening to the strains of a carnival tune. The bright melody drowned the salvos from the ghetto wall, and couples were flying high in the cloudless sky.
At times wind from the burning would drift dark kites along and riders on the carousel caught petals in midair. That same hot wind blew open the skirts of the girls and the crowds were laughing on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.
Someone will read as moral that the people of Rome or Warsaw haddle, laugh, make love hs they pass by matyrs’ pyres. Someone else will read of the passing of things human, of the oblivion born before the flames have died.
But that day I thought only of the loneliness of the dying, of how, when Giordano climbed to his burning he could not find in any human tongue words for mankind, mankind who live on.
Already they were back at their wine or peddled their white starfish, baskets of olives and lemons they had shouldered to the fair, and he already distanced as if centuries had passed while they paused just a moment for his flying in the fire.
Those dying here, the lonely forgotten by the world, our tongue becomes for them the language of an ancient planet. until, when all is legend and many years have passed, on a new Campo dei Fiori rage will kindle at a poet’s word.
This last week the Conservetoire de Montreal has held a festival on the music of Luigi Nono titled: Le Maître du Son et du Silence. Although I’ve been far too busy completing “Inner Music” to attend many events I have seen a concert of his chamber music and another concert of his music for large ensembles.
I’m always approach a loss of words when I attempt to describe Luigi Nono’s music. The first time I posted Nono it was in the guise of a post on the esthetics found in Andrei Tarkovsky’s cinema and in my second post of Nono I just wrote some jumbled phrases that resembled nonsense. The most that I can get from Nono’s music (particularly the later works which I prefer) is his acute awareness of sonic and psychological phenomenology.
I suppose it is because of my difficulty that I’m fascinated by how many people have written about Luigi Nono’s music. Although I’m sure that his early serial procedures, frequent use of text, and far leftist position provide a large body examinable material I think there is something more integral to his esthetic that demands attention, examination, and scrutiny. The two concerts I’ve seen this week demonstrate in more ways that I could have imagined that Nono’s music that is a music best heard live and, possibly more importantly, amongst others engaged in the same active auditory attention, examination, and even some scrutiny.
I have spent the last two years intermittingly trying to understand the music and esthetic(s) of Luigi Nono. Two nights ago, after struggling some with my own piece Inner Music” and thinking about Andrei Tarkovsky’s subjective unplanned intuitive formal constructions I spent three hours listening to Luigi Nono and, I think, I finally begin to get it.
This is not a music I think I can explain and, furthermore, is not a music I care to explain, it is simply a music that requires a concentration on the temporal and dramatic flux or flow. Let the semantic sink back into the semiotic and just enjoy!
’I want to know – do you yourself believe in God or don’t you’ Nikolai Vsevolodovich looked at him sternly.
‘I believe in Russia and Russian Orthodoxy … I believe in the body of Christ … I believe that the Second Coming will be in Russia ... I believe …’ Shatov began to splutter in desperation.
‘And in God? In God?’
‘I … I shall believe in God!’
-Fyodor Dostievsky, “The Possessed”
By means of art man takes over reality through a subjective experience…
A masterpiece is a space closed in upon itself… Beauty is in the balance of the parts. And the paradox is that the more perfect the work, the more clearly does one feel the absence of any associations generated by it. The perfect is unique. Or perhaps it is able to generate an infinite number of associations – which ultimately means the same thing…
The fate of the genius in the system of human knowledge is amazing and instructive. These sufferers…, doomed to destroy in the name of movement and reconstruction, find themselves in a paradoxical state of unstable equilibrium between longing for happiness and the conviction that happiness, as a feasible reality or state, does not exist… Real happiness, happy happiness, consists, as we know, in the aspiration towards that happiness which cannot but be absolute: that absolute after which we thirst…
It is natural, therefore, that not even specialist critics have the delicacy of touch required to dissect for analysis the idea of a work and its poetic imagery. For an idea does not exist in art except in the images which give it form, and the image exists as a kind of grasping of reality by the will, which the artist undertakes according to his own inclinations and idiosyncrasies of his worldview…
Clearly the hardest thing for the working artist is to create his own conception and follow it, unafraid of the strictures t imposes, however rigid these may be…I see it as the clearest evidence of genius when an artist follows his conception, his idea, his principle, so unswervingly that he has this truth of his constantly in his control, never letting go of it even for the sake of his own enjoyment of his work.
And so the discovery of a method becomes the discovery of someone who has acquired the gift of speech. And at that point we may speak of the birth of an image; that is, of a revelation.
